


My Gift From God

by YamiHeart



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Gen, No Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 14:45:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4610694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YamiHeart/pseuds/YamiHeart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The evolution of Canada's name as he goes from French colony to English colony to independent man. Originally written to celebrate Father's Day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Gift From God

_Quebec, 1608_

The young colony peeked out from behind the doorframe leading to his papa’s study. His papa had been busy the whole day with stuffy old men, loud young men, and piles of paperwork, so the young boy had done his best to stay out of the way even though all he had wanted to do was spend time with his new caretaker. Since all the men the boy didn’t know had left, he thought he’d finally be able to play with Papa, but when the boy ran to the room he found Papa hunched over a desk still filling out paperwork. Ten minutes had passed since the boy started hiding behind the doorframe and peeking in every few seconds yet Papa hadn’t noticed him once. Just as the boy was about to retreat for the hundredth time, the hunched-over Frenchman sat up and turned to the doorway.

“ _Mon petit,_ come over here. There is no need to continue hiding.” Papa’s face was warm as he held out an open hand to the boy. The boy hesitated for a moment, but after Papa prompted him again to come he ran as fast as his little legs would allow. Laughing from deep within his throat, Papa scooped the boy up and plunked him down on his lap.

“Are you comfortable?”

The little boy nodded, a happy blush spreading across his cheeks.

“Good. You know, you have come at the perfect time. We have to decide on your official name now that you are my colony.”

The boy’s eyes went wide and he tilted his head back so that he could look at his papa as he stuttered out, “F-France?”

Again, Papa laughed. “No, no. This is different. On the map you shall still be _Nouvelle-France_ , but you need a human name for documentation and every day conversation and…” The boy’s confusion was clear, so Papa grabbed a spare sheet of paper. “Here, I will show you my human name.” He handed the boy the paper after penning his name onto its surface.  “Francois Louis Bonnefoy. That is what most of my citizens know me as because telling them that I am France takes a little more explanation.”

Though the boy did not talk much, his general silence did not mean he lacked intelligence. As it turned out, he was picking up on French quite well. “Fran…swah. Lou…ie. Bon…fwah.”

“Exactly! Now we need to give you a similar name.”

The boy thought briefly before exclaiming, “ _Nouvelle-Francois!_ ”

Papa seemed to always be laughing whenever he was with the little boy he had found in the frozen North. “ _Mon petite…_ I was thinking of something more like this.” He took the paper back from the boy, wrote on it again, and then returned it to the boy’s tiny grasp. “Try reading it out loud.”

The first thing the boy did was point to the last word in his proposed name. “Bonnefoy!”

Papa nodded. “ _Oui,_  Bonnefoy. You are my colony, so it is only right that we share the same last name.”

“Bonnefoy, Bonnefoy, Bonnefoy…” The boy bounced with joy each time he spoke the word. The bouncing slowly stopped, however, as he brought his attention to the middle pair of words in his name. “J… Jah…Jahn… Jahn-Gui…?”

“ _Jean-Guillaume._ ”

“Why?”

“Why that name?”

The boy nodded.

“It is the combined name of some of the truest warriors to ever live and fight for me. In 793, the Moor threat declared war and quickly gained territory in my lands. Guillaume, a cousin of the great Charlemagne, fought the Moors so valiantly that they had no choice but to retreat even though they had won the battle! Jean…” The childlike passion that had entered Papa’s voice softened into sadness with the utterance of the second name. “Jean is the boy form of ‘Jeanne’. Jeanne d’Arc,  _La Pucelle d’Orléans,_ came into my life when little hope remained. She came from nowhere and promised to defend France based on God’s orders. She held more bravery in her heart than all the men in the army she led, and she defeated the man I hate most. She was an angel I did not deserve, and God realized this far too soon.”

“Papa!” The boy stumbled to his feet and pressed his little hands to his papa’s wet cheeks. “Papa, do not cry! No tears, Papa! Please, please, do not cry!”

Papa blinked. He seemed to be snapped out of some sort of trance, but once he was focused on the boy his usual smile returned. “I am sorry,  _mon petit._ ” He pulled the boy into his arms and held him close to his chest. “I truly am. But look at your first name, the one I picked out just for you.”

The boy was hesitant to take his face out of Papa’s warm chest, but he did not want Papa to cry again, either, so he looked at the first name on the paper. “Ma…Math…”

“ _Mathieu._  It means ‘gift from God’, because that is what you are to me.” Papa kissed the top of Mathieu’s head. “My little gift from God, welcome to my world.”

_Quebec, 1764_

“What is this  _rubbish_?”

Mathieu watched his feet swing back and forth under the chair he was sitting on. He flinched when Britain shouted, but didn’t lift his head. Mathieu was fairly certain that eye contact with the empire in front of him would mean death.

“God, I can barely even read what he named you. Bloody French and its nonsensical spelling…” The Brit continued to mumble to himself as he messed with papers strewn across his desk.

Mathieu wondered when he would be able to go home.

“Well, luckily for the both of us, the name he gave you is fairly easy to translate into English. First we shall get rid of this wretched  _Bonnefoy_.” Britain literally spat the name as he crossed it out of the documentation in front of him. “You look more like a ‘Kirkland’ than a ‘Bonnefoy’, anyway.”

The statement pierced Mathieu’s heart and finally got him to raise his head. A Kirkland? He couldn’t be a Kirkland! Papa hated Kirklands! Is that why Mathieu became Britain’s colony? Because he truly looked like a Kirkland?

Mathieu’s heart-broken expression went completely unnoticed by Britain.

“And what is this mess? Honestly, how many names could that frog jam into your name?” Britain shook his head and scratched out Mathieu’s middle name. Now that Mathieu was watching, it felt like his very identity was getting scratched out. “Let me see…Jean-Guillaume would switch to… John-William? Yes, that must be it, but why? ‘Jean’ is a fairly common name, but ‘Guillaume’? I can only think of William the Conqueror, and there is no reason he would name you after the start of my royal line, Norman or not…”

“Charlemagne.”  

Britain’s piercing green gaze forced Mathieu’s violet one back to the floor. “What?”

“G-Guillaume was Charlemagne’s cousin, and he helped scare the Moors out of France, and-!”

“Is that so?” Britain couldn’t have sounded less interested. “How…fanciful. Would you rather keep ‘William’ over ‘John’, then? Both names together is simply too long for a middle name.”

“I…I have to choose?”

“John or William?”

Neither! Mathieu didn’t want either of those names! He wanted the name Jean-Guillaume, the name of a defender of France!

“…John.”

“John it is, then. ‘Mathieu’ is an easy fix; I simply have to change the spelling to something more reasonable. And…there. Welcome to the British Empire, Matthew John Kirkland.”

_Paris, 1867_

“Monsieur Bonnefoy?”

France turned from the window he had been gazing out as he thought and looked to his private apartment’s door. It was odd for his assistant, Madame Beaumont, to see him on a Sunday, so he was curious to see what was so important to know that she could not wait until Monday to tell him.

“Come in.”

Madame Beaumont, a soft woman with touches of gray seeping into her brown locks, showed herself in and sat in a wooden chair near the window France was still standing at.

“I apologize for the intrusion.”

France shook his head. “No, there is no need to apologize. I was doing very little before you arrived, but now that you are here my curiosity is piqued.” He faced her with a cautious smile. A nation never knew what to expect from surprise visits. “What news brings you to me today, Madame Beaumont?”

Madame Beaumont’s smile was warm and put France at some form of ease. “I have come to inform you that a new Confederation has formed in the north.”

The answer Madame Beaumont gave only served to confuse France. “North? North where?”

“North America.”

France’s confusion was only growing. “But…I thought the Confederacy lost the war against the Union…”

Madame Beaumont shook her head and hands. “No, you are thinking too far south. I mean  _north_  North America. I mean…”

His confusion melted into shocked realization. “ _Nouvelle-France?_ You mean _Nouvelle-France_  has gained independence?”

“More or less, yes.”

“But I heard of no war!” Had Britain somehow managed to hide a war from the rest of Europe because their eyes were all on the United States?

“There was no war.”

France had to pull up a chair of his own. “No… No war? Colonies do not get independence without war. The whole continent on the other side of the Atlantic has proven that! Even that one… that one with the prince from Portugal? They fought as well. Not a lot, but there was some fighting.”

Madame Beaumont shrugged. “From what I have heard, all they had to do was ask Britain for independence.”

“ _Ask?_ ”  

“Yes.”

France sat back in his chair and ran his fingers through his bangs. “Asking for independence…I have never…” He laughed. “I did not know Britain had grown so soft! Though I myself always had a hard time saying no to those violet eyes…”

A silence that was weighed down with thought fell between them. Madame Beaumont, respecting her employer’s need to process information at his own pace before speaking, waited patiently for whatever would come out of France’s mouth next.

“You… may not know the answer to this…” He started hesitantly. “But…do you know what name he took?”

“The new confederation? Canada.”

“Ah, no…I mean…”

Madame Beaumont placed a gentle hand on France’s arm. “Matthew Jean Williams. That is the human name he took.”

France turned his head toward the window, and it was not long before Madame Beaumont saw sunlight reflect off pools of tears in the nation’s deep blue eyes.   

“Matthew never spoke much,” his voice was soft to keep from shaking, “so you always had to pay attention to the little details to see what he was trying to say. ‘Matthew’…whether I would like to admit it or not, Britain and I gave him that name together. That name reflects the influences that both the French and British colonizers had on his development. ‘Jean’ is a name he must remember meant a lot to me. To keep that as his middle name…I would like to think that is his way of acknowledging that his French heart shall never go away. Now ‘Williams’… Williams is completely him. There may have been influences, but in the end the name is completely crafted by him. That is his way of telling the world that he is his own man now.”

France covered his face with his hands as his tears poured out faster and harder. Madame Beaumont worried for her nation’s emotional well-being until his hands fell from his face to reveal the happiest smile she had ever seen.

 _“Bienvenue au monde, mon Mathieu._ May you be God’s gift to this world.” 

* * *

 

_Bienvenue au monde, mon Mathieu- Welcome to this world, my Mathieu_


End file.
